Horizontal Skyscraper / Steven Holl

Our friend and architecture photographer,Iwan Baan, just published on his website some of his recently shot images of Steven Holl’s Horizontal Skyscraper in Shenzhen, China. The project is a long mixed-use complex which includes office spaces, apartments, a hotel and even a public landscape. Baan’s photos illustrate Holl’s idea that the “building appears as if it were once floating on a higher sea that has now subsided; leaving the structure propped up high on eight legs.”

Below the elevated building, the combination of green and water elements results in a “tropical landscape” with small restaurants and cafes scattered throughout the park. The underside of the floating structure becomes its main elevation from which sunken glass cubes, the so-called Shenzhen windows, offer 360-degree views over the lush tropical landscape below.

As a tropical, sustainable 21st century vision the building and the landscape integrate several new sustainable aspects. The Vanke Headquarter wing of the floating horizontal skyscraper is aimed at LEED Platinum and the “hovering architecture” eates a porous micro-climate of freed landscape.